Washington University Library Wins Depository Library Award

The John M. Olin Library at Washington University in St. Louis, MO, an Amigos member, was recently honored as a recipient of the 2012 U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) Depository Library of the Year Award. The award was presented at the 2012 Depository Library Council Meeting and Federal Depository Library Conference, October 15-18 in Arlington, VA. Barbara Rehkop, Subject Librarian at the university’s West Campus Library, was on hand to accept the award.

The Olin Library, a Federal Depository Library since 1906, was selected for providing training opportunities to other depository librarians in the area and for collaborating with the regional depository to ensure the needs of the populous St. Louis metro area are served. For the first time, the GPO honored three libraries. According to the GPO, the libraries demonstrated extraordinary levels of service in expanding access to federal government collections and services.

¿Que Pasa? recently visited with Barbara about the award.

QP: First of all, congratulations on receiving this award. The library was cited for the training opportunities provided to other depository librarians and for its collaboration with the regional depository. Can you tell us more about these efforts?

BR: Twelve depository libraries serve the St. Louis Metro area. For the past several years, I have hosted a few meetings a year for local depository librarians. These meetings are open not just to depository librarians; anyone who is interested is certainly welcome to join us. We usually have Marie Concannon, the Regional Depository Librarian for Missouri, join us after the annual conference in Washington D.C. to update us on developments there. We’ve held group viewings of webinars the GPO has offered, and a session where we could look collaboratively at our collections. This past May, in lieu of our annual Missouri depository librarians’ conference, Katrina Stierholz of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and I arranged a regional meeting with topics not only of interest to the depository librarians but also to the more general library community. We were very pleased that over 60 people attended.

This year, the librarians in the group decided that they would like to take turns hosting tours of their libraries and collections. Our first tour will be at Principia College in Illinois! In general, our meetings are quite informal with round-table discussions and lots of sharing of ideas.

QP: The library was also cited for extraordinary efforts in expanding access to government documents. What sort of efforts did the library undertake?

BR: The St. Louis Metro area is home to over two million people, and we have a dozen depository libraries to address their needs. Collection sizes, strengths, and communities served vary widely, so it would not be desirable to reduce that number. With that said, many library systems are looking to expand services and user spaces within their walls while concurrently reducing collections. Since the two regional-level (more-comprehensive) collections are in Columbia, MO, and Springfield, IL, and therefore somewhat removed from the St. Louis population center, we in Missouri are working on a couple of strategies to preserve documents in St. Louis for the St. Louis community.

First, whenever the other St. Louis depositories wish to discard documents, they send their discard list to Washington University first. The list is then distributed to the other St. Louis depositories before being offered to the rest of Missouri. This strategy may allow us to retain as many useful documents as possible in the St. Louis area.

Second, Marie has made arrangements with a number of partners across the state – I think she has six now – to act as regional collections for some groups of documents. In Washington University’s case, we are the regional collection for a group of agencies that focused on civil rights from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. This collection will complement other collections Washington University has, such as the Henry Hampton Collection in our film archives, the Freedom Suits project from our Digital Library Services unit, as well as interest in the History Department, Political Science Department, and African and African-American Studies Department. By specializing in one area of particular interest to one’s immediate community, we may reduce the collection in other areas that are not so much in demand. For instance, my Air Force documents went to the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg, enhancing their collection and allowing for growth of civil rights in ours.

QP: Does a depository library conduct any special outreach efforts to the faculty or special training for library staff to heighten awareness of the materials available to them?

BR: Outreach and awareness are constant challenges for all of us, aren’t they? I hope that by sharing among ourselves, we can provide better internal service to our colleagues as well as service directly to our customers/clients/patrons/users.

I would particularly like to mention the extraordinary outreach efforts of the St. Charles (MO) City-County Library. They re-focused their collection to support current health information – a big need for their community – and sought partnerships with two major medical providers in the area. As a result, they provide current information from government agencies about specific maladies, while offering blood pressure screenings, seminars on other health concerns, etc. It’s been a huge success for them.

QP: The library underwent a major remodeling a few years ago and, more recently, a staff reorganization. Have these changes impacted how you deal with the government documents in your care?

BR: The major remodeling was actually completed nine years ago. However, like many libraries we are constantly evaluating the best use of our spaces to serve our users’ needs and making adjustments, if not major remodeling.

For the documents collection, this has meant that almost all of the collection has been moved to our remote storage location, West Campus, available for the Washington University community, for walk-in visitors, or for interlibrary loan. Since most current documents are issued electronically – the preferred method for our patrons – the impact on our users has been minimal. We have also been cataloging any print monographs that we have received through the depository program into the Library of Congress collection rather than in the Superintendent of Documents classification, where they will be more accessible and “find-able” to anyone browsing the collection.

Staffing-wise, our Dean of more than 20 years, Shirley Baker, retired last summer, as did two of our Associate Deans. Jeffrey Trzeciak, our new University Librarian, began July 1. We are in the midst of hiring two Associate University Librarians. The candidates who’ve interviewed so far have all been very forward-thinking, and I will be pleased to work with any of them. If you like change and challenges – and, generally speaking, I do – then this is an exciting time for us.